The elections to the European Parliament which take place across the EU’s 28 member states between 22 and 25 May are widely seen a series of national contests, which voters use to vent their frustration and give incumbent and established parties a good kicking. Newspaper leader writers and think-tankers got this story and have been working overtime to tell us about a rising tide of populism driven by a range of non-standard protest parties.

The conventional wisdom is that the ‘populist threat’ is all eurosceptic (and usually of a right-wing persuasion) although in some cases the ‘eurosceptic surge’ is clearly a matter of whipping together (and familiar) narrative than careful analysis: how the European Council for Foreign Relations came to think that the pro-business pragmatists of ANO currently topping the polls in the Czech Republic belong in the same eurosceptic bracket as the Austrian Freedom Party, Front national, Hungary’s Jobbik – or even the moderate Catholic conservatives of Law and Justice (PiS) – is very hard to fathom.

But, as a simultaneous EU-wide poll using similar (PR-based) electoral systems, the EP elections also provide a rough and ready yardstick of Europe-wide political trends, ably tracked by the LSE-based Pollwatch 2014 and others.

And, for those interested in comparison and convergence of the two halves of a once divided continent, they a window into the political differences and similarities between the ‘old’ pre-2004 of Western and Southern Europe and the newer members from Central and Eastern Europe (now including Croatia which joined in 2013). Read More…

I’m at conference on the Future of the Left in Central Europe in Prague co-organised by CESTA, one of the Czech Republic’s few centre-left thinktanks, and the German SPD’s Ebert Foundation, having been to an academic workshop on a similar topic the day before. It’s a wide-ranging and interesting event bringing together representatives from various Visegrad socialist parties, Czech anti-capitalist activists and politically engaged academics and the odd non-aligned foreign analyst like me. Shifting through a mass of impressions, notes and tweets at the end of the day, I wasn’t entirely sure where the future of the left in the region, but I did begin to see the political landscape of the region more clearly.

Jiří Pehe’s opening remarks do a good job of putting CEE into broad global context, arguing that as elsewhere the centre-left is faced by the dilemmas of globalisation and global market bearing down upon the limited capacities of the national state. Distinctively though it represents a regional of developed democratic societies without a strong middle class. The political consequences flowing from this were not entirely clear, beyond the fact that the CEE left could not simply follow West European centre-left recipes. In later contributions the specifics of the region – while surfacing occasionally – were not always obvious. Nor were the somewhat differing political fortunes ofsocial democratic and socialist parties across the Visegrad states.

In some cases what was unsaid was as interesting as what was. Read More…